Wednesday, February 09, 2011

POETRY IS COMING, TO THE AWP -- DAY III

Started out the last day with the panel in tribute to Lucille Clifton. My only previous experience of AWP had been a conference in Baltimore, where Lucille Clifton had been present to receive a panel full of tributes and to read from her work. This time the room was filled with friends, and I got the chance to tell Clifton's daughters that I had known their father in his Morgan State days. (For those of you who don't know Clifton's bio., her husband, Fred, was a philosopher and a wonderful teacher. I always wondered what that household must have been like, with a poet and a philosopher and their children.) Later I dropped in to a panel where writers were reading from their works related to D.C. itself, primarily so that I could hear my friend Ethelbert Miller.

That night it was on to THE REEF in Adams Morgan, just below Columbia Road, for the biggest poetry festival of the week, sponsored by Edge Books, Abraham Lincoln Magazine and West Wind Review. Tom Orange played a poem on a C Melody Sax only minutes after Mel Nichols took to the uke, or something like one; I do recall a capo in evidence. K-Lo, who said she'd never answer to that name, did. The whole thing will appear over at Penn Sound before too long. Hope you enjoy it as much as we all did.